AI coding agents have become increasingly useful lately. The main reason, as far as I can understand, is that agents like Claude Code can close the loop: they can produce code, test it, and iterate. This is critical because models will make mistakes, and the feedback loop allows them to iteratively correct problems and usually converge on a working solution.
When trying to use coding agents with embedded systems, I quickly found myself becoming a manual tester, copy-pasting logs and describing behavior back to the agent. I was the one closing the loop, which is both inefficient and frustrating. So I started looking for ways to improve that.
Control by CLI
One of the great strengths of coding agents is that they can close the loop through the command line. They can invoke CLI tools, and by assembling them together they can achieve far more than any single tool would allow, this is essentially the Unix philosophy applied to AI-assisted development.
The most effective way to extend an agent’s capabilities that I’ve found so far is to build dedicated command line tools and let the agent use them. I ran a couple of experiments with dev boards where I had the agent create a small Python tool to control the board. The minimum useful functionality was: flash firmware, observe the console output, and reset the board. With just those three capabilities, the agent gains the ability to iterate almost entirely on its own.
The crazyflie-agent-cli
This is where the idea came from for creating such a tool for the Crazyflie. I chose to write it in Rust, partly to exercise our newly developed Crazyflie Rust library.
The capabilities I gave it are:
- Flash the Crazyflie using the bootloader
- Reset the Crazyflie into bootloader or firmware mode
- Console, stream the debug text output from the firmware
- Parameters, read and write parameter values
- Log variables, stream the value of log variables
This is roughly the minimum viable feature set for Crazyflie firmware development. Since AI coding agents already know how to write C code and compile projects, this is, in theory, enough to close the loop and let an agent implement new functionality, flash it, observe the behavior, find a bug, and iterate, just like in a normal development workflow.
Designing a CLI for agents, not humans
One design challenge worth mentioning: the Crazyflie communication model is inherently stateful. As a human, you would open an interactive client, connect to the drone, and then poke around, reading parameters, watching log variables, tweaking things live. That interactive, session-based workflow doesn’t translate well to agents, which can’t use interactive CLIs. Instead, the crazyflie-agent-cli uses a daemon/client architecture: the agent first launches a background daemon that establishes the radio connection, then uses separate one-shot commands to interact with the already-connected Crazyflie. It’s not the most ergonomic design for humans, you end up needing two terminals, but it turns out to work surprisingly well for an agent, which has no trouble managing background processes and firing off commands independently.
Putting it all together
The CLI gives the agent the capability to interact with the Crazyflie, but it also needs to know how to use it. We could tell the agent at the start of every session “here is a tool you can use,” and it would figure things out by calling --help. But a much more efficient approach is to use skills.
Alongside the CLI, I created a skill that teaches the agent how to use the tool for Crazyflie firmware development: what the workflow looks like, how to flash, how to debug. This is what truly closes the loop, once the skill is in place, the agent knows what a Crazyflie is, how to flash it, and how to debug it, without needing much guidance.
The end result: Claude Code can implement simple firmware functionality largely in one shot, and even when it doesn’t get it right the first time, it will iterate and generally get there.
Here is an example prompt that works end-to-end:
I have a Crazyflie on channel 80, 2M, default address. Add a log variable that exposes
the free heap size so I can monitor it over time. Build, flash, and verify the new
variable appears in the log list.Code language: PHP (php)After a little while, the Crazyflie has been flashed, functionality has been verified and result looks something like:
Conclusion
This tool is not an official Bitcraze product, it’s a Fun Friday project. But we think it’s a nice demonstration of what is becoming possible with AI coding agents. By closing the loop, we can start to accelerate firmware development the same way AI has already accelerated other kinds of software development. That said, this is a force multiplier, not a replacement for engineering judgment. The human still needs to be in the loop.
For instance, I believe this CLI is already capable enough to let an agent bring up a new deck with a new sensor, exactly the kind of scoped, iterative task where the available functionality is sufficient. The tool could certainly be improved with more features, and we’ll see how much that happens. But we expect it will likely find its way into some of our day-to-day Crazyflie work at Bitcraze.
For the time being, treat it as an experiment and an example, not a finished product. The code is on GitHub at ataffanel/crazyflie-agent-cli if you want to try it out.
